This is an adaptation of the Julian Barnes novel.

Webster (Jim Broadbent) has a camera shop and receives a letter. The letter is from a woman now dead and it speaks of the diary of a friend of his youth. This was a friend who killed himself, for who knows what reason, and Webster has always felt that he was to blame. He tries to obtain the diary – he wants answers, needs to lance his guilt.

It is a decent film with fine performances from Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, and it flits deftly from the past to the present, the present to the past (on entering a pub, the youthful Webster hears a burst of Nick Drake). Yet you have to say that Webster gets off a little too lightly. There is a minor irritation of conscience when remembering his former friend’s death. Some ointment is applied – a warm conversation with his ex-wife – and, wonder of wonders, all is well.

Although Meryl Streep’s central performance is certainly remarkable, taken as a whole this film seems superficial and false.

There’s a whistle-stop tour through Thatcher’s time in office but certain key events – the miners’ strike, the Toxteth riots, the Bruges speech – are absent. The scene where Maggie is undergoing voice-training is rather too close to a scene in The King’s Speech. Let’s be charitable and call this homage. When Mrs. Thatcher first enters the Commons, we see her bare feet in high-heeled shoes, a contrast to the men’s highly polished black brogues. A nice touch, but one thinks it likely that, even as a young woman, she always would have worn tights.

It is clear that there’s an intended irony arising from Lady Thatcher’s fragility in old age and the given epithet of The Iron Lady, but are there really grounds for believing that she speaks to her dead husband? And what is the point of making a film about an actual person, if you are going to invent details about their life? Either stick to the facts or have a fictional character and invent any damn thing. These kind of films are infuriating because they’re neither one thing nor another.

A disappointing film, then, but it was interesting to see Mrs. Thatcher in the Commons and to realise that this has never been part of our collective memory. None of the public saw her when she spoke there.

Another Year
Directed by Mike Leigh
UK, 2010
Cornerhouse, 7 November 2010

Still from Another Year

Mike Leigh’s latest film is, as per usual some may say, a closely observed social comedy.

Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) live a comfortable, some may say cartoonish, middle-class existence but some of their friends, notably Mary (Lesley Manville), are rather more desperate.

There’s an unsparing quality to Leigh’s work which I admire, an unwillingness to sugar-coat social realities or to be deceived about them. It gives rise often to a subtle cruelty, a disdain, when people meet and speak to each other.

In ‘Gooseberries’ Chekhov writes of the invisibility of the sad and the stricken; those who live more comfortable existences, such as Tom and Gerri here, simply do not notice them. Or, if they do, they see them simply as a nuisance. It is a charge one could never place at the director’s door.

If there is one point that I’d level at Leigh (and I’m not sure really whether it’s a criticism: you could say the same thing about Woody Allen, say, or a slue of other directors) it is that he has a tendency to recycle his characters. Katie in this film (Karina Fernandez) is Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky, while as for Mary we’ve seen her many times before. She is the guest that you cannot get rid of.

Nonetheless this is a very special film, a distillation almost of all that’s good about Leigh. There’s a stirling cast and plenty of fine performances.